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AU Payroll - Ability to apply work patterns to part time employees

Suggest the ability to apply work patterns to part time employees. For example, we have a part time employee who works 7 hours on Mon, 6 hours on Tues and 6 hours on Wed.
At the moment, if a Public Holiday falls on a Monday, it does not correctly work out hours worked.
The same happens if Annual Leave is taken; incorrect hours are calculated which affects AL accruals.
Hours worked have to be calculated and added manually.

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Lesley Webster shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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Accepted  ·  AdminKelly Munro (Community Manager, Xero) responded  · 

Hey everyone 👋 Thanks so much for all the detailed feedback on applying work patterns for part-time employees. We’ve been following the conversation and understand that manually adjusting pay runs for pro-rata entitlements can be a real challenge. It’s clear that having this automated could save time and give you greater peace of mind.

I’m pleased to let you know our product team has reviewed this idea and we’re updating the status to ‘Accepted’. This means that while it’s not on our immediate roadmap, it’s something we see real value in and want to bring into Xero when we can prioritise the work.

In the meantime, the workarounds shared here, like manually adjusting hours in each pay run, remain the best approach. We really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts, as your feedback plays a crucial role in shaping Xero. We’ll keep you updated on any developments here. 🙂

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  • Anne McPhee commented  ·   ·  Report

    Why is Xero not responding to these comments. If the function is available in NZ, is there any plan to roll out in Australia?

  • Sam Chapman commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is absolutely essential. All the benefits of moving from MYOB to Xero are being undone by the wasted time each payroll day, with having to "fix" annual leave requests for all part-time staff.

  • Noami Steele commented  ·   ·  Report

    Why do we not have this yet?
    Its 2025 so many employees' work part time, different days, different hours, its becoming a payroll nightmare!

  • Elaine Robinson commented  ·   ·  Report

    We have this in the UK with payroll but it does not correctly calculate the hours to pay when unpaid leave is taken or if the beginning/end of the month is a non working day or weekend and there has been a change Xero doesn't pay the employee for the full month. This means we have to do manual adjustments (if we spot it is wrong) See help desk call CX0016738686 - Xero does not calculate the employee pay correctly. Hopefully they are fixing this so it works correctly for you.

  • Tiarna Nouwland commented  ·   ·  Report

    This feature is available within the UK and NZ (i believe) systems, but not Australia? Given the back end software development work has already been done for those countries, surely Xero can speed up the introduction of this feature for Australian customers? It has been highly requested for many years.

  • Stephen Bowring commented  ·   ·  Report

    It looks like the approach from Xero in AU is try and get people to by the rostering solution to try and resolve this issue as it has some features which people are screaming for in this thread (and several other like i). I tried out the rostering solution in beta. Perhaps it could work for a large organisation with many employees and complex rostering needs or where rostering is critical. We own a hair salon and it would just add significant work. Half of our employees are part time. Time and attendance and leave management is useless in Xero without work patterns. You cannot even get staff to apply for leave. It just doesnt work. Who would have thought in 2025 where you have an AI agent that can help you with invoicing yet you need to manage your staff work patterns in a separate system and work out leave requests with a calculator.

  • Daniel Thompson commented  ·   ·  Report

    We're moving to Odoo. Setup with minimal features and it can be a similar cost. Or you can set it up with more of its ERP features and it can do a lot!

  • Anne McPhee commented  ·   ·  Report

    I agree Daniel, Xero seems to be ignoring our feedback. Can I ask which you are moving too?

  • Daniel Thompson commented  ·   ·  Report

    I commented on this thread a while back and so have many people. This is a crucial function for our business. Unfortunately there appears to be no movement from Xero. So, we've taken the decision to leave Xero and move to a different software platform that has this and other capabilities out of the box (like Sales Orders which has its own thread just like this one).

  • Yael Allan commented  ·   ·  Report

    90% of our staff are part-time. It's hard to keep track of everyone's hours in separate spreadsheets. Having this feature in Xero will make it much easier to manage and ensure the correct hours are paid each day.

  • Riley Neville commented  ·   ·  Report

    As a lot of businesses like ours are moving to 4 day work weeks for all their employees this is an absolutely critical feature!

  • Lisa Tyndall commented  ·   ·  Report

    So important! And seems an easy programmatic fix. There is no real life scenario where any business would want 20% of the work hours of a part time employee applied for a given local holiday. It makes no sense and has no basis in reality. Please prioritize this as your work around of editing the hours one employee at a time cannot be implemented on any significant scale.

  • Saul Wende commented  ·   ·  Report

    This feature should be available in Australia. Why hasnt it been rolled out with other regions ?

  • Tiarna Nouwland commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is a critical feature that should have been implemented as a matter of priority. UK and NZ have this feature, so i am perplexed why it cannot be rolled out to suit Australian payroll.

  • Tasha Palmer commented  ·   ·  Report

    We only have 4 part-timers but it is annoying that the public holidays and leave have to be manually adjusted every time.

  • Geoff Bourchier commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is now available in NZ under the Employment Information Tab for Employees. There is now an option to add pay and work patterns.

    I am not sure about Australia, but it would pay to check as the change was not widely promoted, and I found it by accident.

  • Nancy Ibrahim commented  ·   ·  Report

    very important to select specific days for part time employees who works certain days in the week, which fall on public holiday.
    As currently if (for example) the employee works on Tuesday & Wednesday and a public holiday fall in that week on Monday, the system automatically add the public holiday rate and payment, however he doesn't work on Monday! so I've to adjust it manually.

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